Free Press Pounds FCC In Post

Fress Press has gone wide with its unhappiness over the FCC’s meetings about a possible legislative fix to the Comcast/BitTorrent decision.

Cable and telcos are the ones usually cited for having the big bucks to spend on campaigns promoting their Washington agendas, but Free Press ponied up for a full-page ad in the Washington Post Wednesday morning  taking aim at FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski for meeting “behind closed doors” with lobbyists to “cut a deal that would effectively hand over control of the Internet to Verizon and Comcast and AT&T.”

The reference was to meetings between various stakeholders–including AT&T and Verizon and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, over targeted legislation that would clarify the FCC’s authority to regulate network management.

“President Obama, you promised to take ‘a back seat to no one in protecting net neutrality and free speech, don’t let our Internet go the way of Wall Street and the Gulf of Mexico,” the ad reads, under a headline in giant type reading: “Big Oil, Big Banks, Big Phone, Big Cable, Same $ellout.”

Free Press is backing the FCC’s proposal to reclassify broadband transmissions under Title II common carrier regs.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.